The
AA website describes various problems and nasties with 4G dongles but not 3G ones. The 3G ones seem to be Firebrick-friendly because from what I can gather, not having researched them at all, they sound more like a dialup modem (even going so far as to have something like Hayes modem AT commands) not a pppoe-speaking router, which would be ideal. It says that 4G ones are USB Ethernet NICs, so I am assuming that that means one has to send Ethernet frames to such a device? I wonder why there is this difference, why aren’t some of the 4G modems using the earlier approach - is it perhaps something to do with speed?
If I were to try a 4G dongle such as the
ZTE MF823 with the Firebrick, apparently I would need to get it reconfigured first to put it into dialup modem mode because in its default state it is an Ethernet NIC and is also a router and does NAT whether you want it to or not. This would be a disaster because it could then not handle traffic to my routed address block without molesting the packets on the way through, but apparently putting it into dial-up modem mode prevents this. This seems very arbitrary, NAT that you can’t turn off, and whuch should be up to you and the ISP, in one mode and not in the other.
So to prevent NAT, I would need to get it configured for me as I don’t have a suitable machine at hand, the Raspberry Pi having been bricked and me being otherwise PC-free. I could perhaps ask AA if they would configure one for me. Or I could try getting my neighbour or a friend to configure one for me.
That website may well be a year or two out of date, as it often seems to be that they do not get updated very frequently. There may be better 4G dongles out there now, and some may be friendlier (or the opposite),
Does anyone know of other dongles that speak 4G and are hassle-free in that they can speak dialup modem speak by default? If you have one I would be interested to have a peep at the docs.
I am currently getting horrible speeds from my Huawei 3G dongle that is plugged into my Firebrick, not that it matters as it is only for use as a backup link. I am assuming that this is due to positioning. That dongle does not speak 4G. My iPad with an AA SIM in it gets 8Mbps downstream over 3G using Three, and this is in a bad position in the bedroom. Moving slightly to the right, it will switch to 4G instead. So I take this as an indication that there is a possibility of far better 3G speeds from the dongle if moved into a good position.
Is the antenna in a dongle horrible? I am wondering if the antenna in an iPad is perhaps better? I don’t know how on earth they manage to package these things within the physical size constraints.
